The present disclosure relates to an information processing apparatus, an input control method of the information processing apparatus, and a program. More specifically, the disclosure relates to input control based on a depression operation.
In recent years, various electronic apparatuses such as cellular phones, personal digital assistants, personal computers, and car navigation systems which employ a touch panel or a touch pad for input operation have been put into practical use. In these apparatuses, it is a common practice to detect a position of touch using a tap operation with a stylus or an operating finger to perform selection and an input determination operation of a menu button, a software keyboard key, or the like. However, when the selection and the input determination are performed by the tap operation, the size of the button is small with respect to the size of the operating finger or the stylus, so that erroneous depression may often occur.
In order to cope with this problem, there is proposed a method using a pressure-sensitive sensor mounted on an apparatus. In this method, depression of a virtual key on a software keyboard is detected by the pressure-sensitive sensor. While obtaining tactile feedback using the depressing force of the virtual key, key input is performed (refer to JP-T-1999-119882, for example). In the operation method disclosed in JP-T-1999-119882, only leading kana characters (which are “a”, “ka”, “sa”, “ta”, “na”, “ha”, “ma”, “ya”, “ra”, “wa”) in a Japanese kana table are assigned to respective virtual keys. When a certain leading kana character (such as “na”) is touched from among the leading kana characters, subordinate kana characters (such as “no” “ni”, “nu”, “ne”, and “no”) belonging to the touched leading kana character of the virtual key are displayed. According to JP-T-1999-119882, pressure thresholds are provided in a step-by-step manner to select the respective subordinate kana characters. Then, by comparing a pressure of depressing the virtual key by an operating finger with each of the pressure thresholds provided in the step-by-step manner, one of the subordinate kana characters belonging to the touched virtual key is selected.
According to the operation method disclosed in JP-T-1999-119882, an operator needs to adjust a depressing force for selecting a desired one of the subordinate kana characters, in a step-by-step manner. This adjustment operation leads to a character selection error, and a burden on the operating finger at a time of input is also great.